Careful Words

ocean (n.)

ocean (adj.)

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

John Milton (1608-1674): Lycidas. Line 168.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York,

And all the clouds that loured upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;

And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,—

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): King Richard III. Act i. Sc. 1.

'T was whisper'd in heaven, 't was mutter'd in hell,

And echo caught faintly the sound as it fell;

On the confines of earth 't was permitted to rest,

And the depths of the ocean its presence confess'd.

Catherine M. Fanshawe (1764-1834): Enigma. The letter H.

How beautiful is night!

A dewy freshness fills the silent air;

No mist obscures; nor cloud, or speck, nor stain,

Breaks the serene of heaven:

In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine

Rolls through the dark blue depths;

Beneath her steady ray

The desert circle spreads

Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.

How beautiful is night!

Robert Southey (1774-1843): Thalaba. Book i. Stanza 1.

Were I so tall to reach the pole,

Or grasp the ocean with my span,

I must be measured by my soul:

The mind's the standard of the man.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748): Horae Lyricae. Book ii. False Greatness.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Macbeth. Act ii. Sc. 2.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers,

 .   .   .   .   .

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane,—as I do here.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 184.

Past are three summers since she first beheld

The ocean; all around the child await

Some exclamation of amazement here.

She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,

Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?

That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,—

Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold,

Soul discontented with capacity,—

Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say

She was enchanted by the wicked spells

Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed

The western winds have landed on our coast?

I since have watcht her in lone retreat,

Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864): Gebir. Book ii.

Embosom'd in the deep where Holland lies.

Methinks her patient sons before me stand,

Where the broad ocean leans against the land.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774): The Traveller. Line 282.

And o'er them the lighthouse looked lovely as hope,—

That star of life's tremulous ocean.

Paul Moon James (1780-1854): The Beacon.

How beautiful is night!

A dewy freshness fills the silent air;

No mist obscures; nor cloud, or speck, nor stain,

Breaks the serene of heaven:

In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine

Rolls through the dark blue depths;

Beneath her steady ray

The desert circle spreads

Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.

How beautiful is night!

Robert Southey (1774-1843): Thalaba. Book i. Stanza 1.

Past are three summers since she first beheld

The ocean; all around the child await

Some exclamation of amazement here.

She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,

Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?

That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,—

Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold,

Soul discontented with capacity,—

Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say

She was enchanted by the wicked spells

Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed

The western winds have landed on our coast?

I since have watcht her in lone retreat,

Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864): Gebir. Book ii.

Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows;

Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): The Homeric Hexameter. (Translated from Schiller.)

  I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727): Brewster's Memoirs of Newton. Vol. ii. Chap. xxvii.

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,

Reason the card, but passion is the gale.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Essay on Man. Epistle ii. Line 107.

And thou, vast ocean! on whose awful face

Time's iron feet can print no ruin-trace.

Robert Montgomery (1807-1855): The Omnipresence of the Deity. Part i.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control

Stops with the shore.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 179.

As down in the sunless retreats of the ocean

Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see,

So deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion,

Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee.

As still to the star of its worship, though clouded,

The needle points faithfully o'er the dim sea,

So dark when I roam in this wintry world shrouded,

The hope of my spirit turns trembling to Thee.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852): The Heart's Prayer.

A sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,—

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

She was his life,

The ocean to the river of his thoughts,

Which terminated all.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: The Dream. Stanza 2.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear;

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Thomas Gray (1716-1771): Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Stanza 14.

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): The Ancient Mariner. Part ii.

And ne'er shall the sons of Columbia be slaves,

While the earth bears a plant or the sea rolls its waves.

Robert Treat Paine (1772-1811): Adams and Liberty.

Oh the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,—

A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing!

Julia Pardoe (1816-1862): The Captive Greek Girl.